From the author of

From the author of

In this article, we will outline step 1 in a 10-step planning process
that's intended to prepare you for an Exchange 2000 deployment. This entire
process was created from the best practices of Compaq, Lucent, and Software
Spectrum consultants, summarizing their knowledge from deploying millions of
Exchange seats worldwide.

Before we step into the details, let's go over some fundamentals. First,
the more time you invest in planning and testing, the better your deployment
will execute, the happier your users will be, and the easier your life will be
after your deployment is complete! Second, our recommendation is not to get
bogged down in attempting to determine the absolutely precise fit for your
company. Build a basic plan that will meet the majority of needs and fine-tune
as you go. If you make proper fundamental choices (and test in the lab to
verify), you can build in additional functions and tweak details later. Finally,
this article focuses on planning a "pure" Exchange 2000 system, not
migrating from an existing mail system.

The 10 steps are:

Understand your users.

Perform Windows 2000 integration.

Define Exchange routing groups.

Create a naming strategy.

Establish Exchange connectivity.

Design an information store architecture.

Select hardware for Exchange.

Design for Internet connectivity.

Plan for administration of the system.

Review your plan.

We will cover step 1 in this article.

Step 1: Understanding Your Users' Needs

As much as technologists might dislike it, the most important source of
information about what your users are doing and what they believe they want to
do in the future is from the users themselves. All other types of monitoring and
extrapolation can provide only ancillary evidence to support what the users are
actually doing,